Luster(41)

“A new do! Very nice!” Eric says to Akila when he passes by her room. He lingers in the doorway and asks how much time it took and makes a joke about how heavy her head must feel. He mentions a black woman at work who always changes her hair, and he asks a slew of slightly invasive questions with this bright, apologetic look on his face. I have had this exact exchange more times than I can count, but I can’t tell if Eric is trying so hard because he is white, or if it is because he is a dad. When he leaves, Akila looks at me and laughs.



* * *



I look through my self-portraits, and I can’t see myself, but I am well acquainted with every corner of the house. A habit has been built. I clean all the windows in the house, polish the silver, smoke a few cigarettes. I lie around in the dark and indulge all the bright half-dreams, the speed and pavement, the staggered lips of cliffs and yawning desert. I wander around the house after midnight and find the door to Rebecca and Eric’s bedroom slightly ajar, and they are having what is, in their case, aptly called sexual intercourse. It does not look like porn but still defies description, Eric enormous and rectangular, Rebecca feral and smooth. Regrettably, they are beautiful, and per their soft chatter and tender readjustment, at least a little bit in love. I take a few photos with my phone, and I check the time. I want to go to bed, but I feel obligated to stay until they finish, and when they do, Rebecca rolls over and turns up the TV.

I return to my room, scroll through the pictures, and do three preliminary sketches. I touch myself and try to imagine what it is like to have comfortable, familiar sex, to be pounded sweetly as James Corden does his monologue. I wake up in the afternoon, walk two miles to the rink and get some soft-serve ice cream, feed a pretzel to a pigeon with an atrophied leg. I go to the mall and play the arcade games they keep in the food court, and, after talking to a Sears associate about all-terrain tires, I buy a blue dress.



* * *



At home, I put on the dress and for the first time in a while, I feel like a person someone might want to kiss. I sit in front of the mirror and apply makeup, my hand unsteady and the kohl too heavy around my eyes. I put on lipstick, scrub it off, and then put it on again. I watch Rebecca drive away and I go down to the basement, where Eric is looking through the largest collection of vinyl I have ever seen. When I see him, I feel short of breath, and I pause on the stairs and consider turning back. He glances at me and pulls a record from a thick, plastic sleeve. All of it is coordinated and strategically filed, shrink-wrapped and, in some cases, refrigerated, all the dials set to fifty-five, all of twelve-inch Philadelphia funneling into the derivative and French, into the 4/4 and South Bronx, the minimalist German records most apparently handled, the entire room kind of hairy and out of time with the dirty shag and wood paneling and green La-Z-Boy. He lets the needle down, and I continue my silent tour as something is made of the polymer and spiral groove, something preserved but ultimately Jurassic, the sound opaque and full of grain, which I understand as a function of authenticity and also as a condemnation of my ears, which find this cool but mostly just okay. He hands me a glass of gin and wipes the lipstick off my face with the back of his hand. The gin is warm, and the record is Brazilian and very reliant on the theremin. He pours himself a drink and circles the room, pausing only to fuss with the player, which is a beautiful machine but within this context a stark digression with its digital numbers and sleek, aluminum deck. No record is right. At the two-minute mark, Eric swaps one out for another, and then again, the interval between records smaller each time, so that by the fifth it is an erasure, the business of replacing the vinyl bracketing the lyric and unresolved brass. When he finds a record that is satisfactory, he crosses the room and pushes me into the wall. He rolls up his sleeve and wraps his hand around my throat, a thoughtful, preliminary squeeze, as if the hand is not his own. He tries the other hand, and this one, the left one, seems to be the one he prefers. He says, You want this, like it is a question and then like it is a statement, and the most immediate cost of our two-week silence is that I have forgotten his voice, which now seems too soft and too high. Up close, every detail is slightly diminished. The assessment is mutual. His hand slackens as he searches my face for where the memory became corrupt, and then his hand tightens, becomes deliberate, each one of his fingers jointed and distinct, everything reduced and anatomical, my cartilage and salivary glands explicit, my breath half-drawn and made into something sharp and unexpressed in my chest. That I can’t breathe does not immediately feel like a problem. There are things happening in the interim, a door opening upstairs, an eyelash on his cheek, and before he fully commits to the grip, he lifts the glass of gin from my hand. Thank you, I almost say. But my voice is gone, and the room is gone, though on my way out I notice that the record has begun to skip.





7


In the weeks that follow, we are new. There is some attempt at an apology he doesn’t mean and that I don’t want, and then we stand at different windows and wait for Rebecca to drive away. He lets himself into my room and we trip over ourselves while we undress, the contact tenuous and inexact, kisses spoiled by fervor, full of air and teeth and always off the intended mark, though I am just happy to be touched. We wait for the moments Akila and Rebecca are not home, but ardor is a kind of negligence. Rooms are chosen indiscriminately and sometimes doors are not properly closed. The days are shorter in October, and we take full advantage of the nights.